Despite a last-ditch legal bid to block the event, the White House spent the night as a marketing department for the private fighting company
A warm Sunday night on the South Lawn – with bright lights, fireworks, a fighter plane flyover, thousands of spectators, and the first major professional sporting event ever staged at the White House – produced many memorable scenes. One might linger more than most.
Justin Gaethje, the American interim lightweight champion, stood alone in the Oval Office in his fight shorts, draped in an American flag, studying a framed Declaration of Independence before he turned to walk out to the cage.
It wasn’t the first time hand-to-hand combat had taken place on the grounds of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Theodore Roosevelt boxed and wrestled there, sparring with aides, and a session with a young military officer detached the retina in his left eye, leaving him partially blind for the rest of his presidency. Roosevelt told almost no one, and it wasn’t disclosed publicly until he left office.
But Sunday, or Donald Trump’s 80th birthday, inverted that mystique. The combat – inside an octagon, overshadowed by 92ft of steel called “the Claw” – was anything but hidden.
This was the moment the American presidency, under Trump, completed its symbolic merger with a private fighting company: the Ultimate Fighting Championship, or UFC.
It was a spectacle intertwining in patriotism and history, packaged to feel completely real. Sincerity was the delivery mechanism to the viewers: the actions were secondary to how they are perceived.
The UFC spent its early years banned in a majority of US states. Its CEO Dana White has spent the last few years telling the story of how one man – Trump – had been willing to stage what everyone else called it a sideshow, or worse. On Sunday, this partnership led this one figure sport to heart of the US federal government.
Fighters walked through the White House itself and down a military honor-guard corridor of flags and rifles, with the south portico repurposed as a grand entrance. Trump and White made the walk together, cameras trailing, before reaching a balcony where the Zac Brown Band played and military aircraft passed low overhead, which Trump saluted. They walked a red carpet to their seats in the front row.
Broadcasters including Joe Rogan and Daniel Cormier called the fights cageside, while other commentators worked a separate desk from the historic Green Room, traditionally used to receive foreign dignitaries. Rogan’s tie was several inches short, which amid all the choreography felt like the only unrehearsed thing on the lawn.
Visually it fell into one palette – red, white and blue gloves, shorts, canvas and costume design – with ring-card girls dressed as versions of Wonder Woman, Supergirl and assorted other American-coded superheroines. Patriotism and licensed IP, side by side.
Outside the perimeter, at the Ellipse, a small group of protesters built a cardboard cage of their own, populated with oversized puppets of the president and his cabinet, while thousands upon thousands of fans walked past them into the massive viewing area.
Luis, 18, who’d traveled from Colorado, said he didn’t really see the event as political – that it was simply “the first time anything like this has been done at the White House”, which was exciting enough on its own. Emily Moore, 23, up from New York to see Gaethje fight, put it more simply: “We applied for the tickets and got them, and we love UFC.”
But the protesters at the gate had a more specific complaint than “this is weird”: that the White House – an institution whose entire value rests on the idea that it belongs to the public, and answers to no sponsor – had spent the evening as a marketing department for a private company. A last-ditch legal bid to block the event failed on Friday.
Sponsor logos on the mat included Polymarket; the offshore crypto casino Stake; a tourism campaign for the once-ostracized Riyadh; and Bud Light. The event was broadcast on Paramount+, the streaming service now controlled by the billionaire Ellison family, whose patriarch Larry happens to be a close ally of Trump. The Paramount Skydance CEO, David Ellison, was in attendance, and so was Meta’s CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, and Crypto.com’s CEO, Kris Marszalek.
Some fighters were due bonuses in USD1, a stablecoin from World Liberty Financial, a Trump family venture and official sponsor of the card. (A White House spokesman said there was no conflict of interest, since the relevant assets sit in a trust run by the president’s children.)
With the event under way, and Trump gathered with his closest allies, aides and relatives, the debate about whether it was remotely appropriate to stage fighting at the White House was over. It was happening.
But the event did not draw halt the controversy. In the midst of a rambling post-fight interview one fighter, Josh Hokit, reached for a false conspiracy claim. “Michelle Obama is a man,” he said of the former first lady, who used to live where he was standing.
The fighting itself was brutal, and genuinely skillful, with all seven matches ending in either a knockout or technical knockout.
But the opening fight – Diego Lopes, the betting favorite, against Steve Garcia – had generated its own subplot before it had even started, after Cormier posted, then deleted, screenshots of messages purportedly from Eric Trump, asking whether any results were “rigged” and pressing for injury information on fighters.
Both sides later denied the exchange. “This did not happen. They were AI generated,” wrote Eric Trump. Cormier added: “Are people really this dumb?”
The two people supposedly involved insist the conversation definitely didn’t happen. But if you were looking for the cleanest possible illustration of state and commerce and family business all occupying the same 6in of a phone screen, it would be hard to improve on a member of the First Family allegedly fishing for inside information on a corporate event staged in honor of his father, on the lawn of the house his father was elected to hold.
After his moment alone in the Oval Office, Gaethje walked out and won his fight, taking the undisputed lightweight title in one of the bigger upsets in the sport’s history.
It was past 1am by the time Trump entered the cage to congratulate him and greet his mother. The lawn went up in fireworks, set to John Philip Sousa’s Stars and Stripes Forever.
Asked what the win meant, Gaethje said: “I’m from America. Two hundred and fifty years ago, we were way bigger than six-to-one underdogs, and look at this country now”.
The world is certainly watching.
Fabiola Cineas contributed reporting
